Research: State of Storage 2012

The lot of IT storage administrators has never been an easy one. End users and new applications consume capacity almost as soon as it’s brought online, so we're constantly adding disk drives, storage arrays, disk volumes and network shares, in a never-ending game of catch-up. At times, it must feel like being head chef at an all-you-can-eat buffet when the high school football team drops in for a postgame snack.

Fortunately, storage technology has advanced fast enough that keeping plates full is seldom a problem--if you can afford to buy the gear. The good news for budgets is that our 2012 InformationWeek State of Storage survey shows demand stabilizing. Blindly piling on disk capacity, upgrading SANs, building new converged networks, and adding fancy data reduction or storage virtualization technologies aren't atop most respondents' to-do lists. Storage administrators still worry, however, about meeting resource requirements for mission-critical apps, and our data shows that we’re more concerned than ever about data integrity, security and redundancy.

Storage pros, both our respondents and industry experts, are developing more mature, holistic and nuanced strategies for handling today’s problems. This is reflected in the growing use of solid-state storage for high throughput needs; cloud services for backup, archiving and disaster recovery; scale-out storage architectures for cost-effective, highly resilient capacity growth; and data encryption to protect information both on premises and off. We'll highlight promising new technologies that aren’t yet on most respondents' radar and offer some advice as you plan your 2012 storage strategy. (R4190212)

Survey Name: InformationWeek 2012 State of Storage SurveySurvey Date: January 2012Region: North AmericaNumber of Respondents: 313